Blinded by their ambition, Silicon Valley elites are helping Communist China achieve their ultimate goal: “Technology supremacy” over the West.
“Science and technology is a national weapon,” President Xi Jinping has said. “We should seize the commanding heights of technological competition and future development.”
To accomplish this goal, Beijing has created “civilian-military fusion,” which means any technological advance in the civilian market must be applied directly to the military sphere. And they have effectively courted and seduced many powerful people in America’s tech industry to willingly, and sometimes enthusiastically, play along.
FACEBOOK
In 2015, the Obama Administration held an official State Dinner at the White House for China’s Xi. The East Room was decorated in peach and pink roses. The crowd included two hundred elite guests from the world of government and business. Among them was Mark Zuckerberg, the young-looking cofounder of Facebook, and his wife, Priscilla, who was seven months pregnant. When Zuckerberg finally got his chance to see the guest of honor face-to-face, he made an unusual request: would the communist dictator give his child his Chinese name?
Xi, understandably surprised by the request, declined, saying it was “too great a responsibility.”
It was not the first time the Facebook cofounder had gushed over Chinese officials.
In late 2014, a high-ranking Chinese official named Lu Wei made a trip to Silicon Valley. Lu was a Communist Party hack, the former deputy head of the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of China. President Xi had recently appointed him to head the “Central Leading Group for Internet Security and Information.” In short, Lu was China’s Internet czar, with the Orwellian job of restricting access to certain ideas and monitoring the flow of information.
The Chinese government had given him plenty of tools to do his job. In 2013, they created a law making it a crime to spread rumors online; if a post deemed untrue received more than five hundred reposts, the original poster could be sentenced to up to three years in prison.
But when Lu visited Facebook’s California headquarters in Menlo Park, Zuckerberg treated him like a VIP. The Facebook head gave him a tour of the new Frank Gehry–designed campus, which boasted the “largest open floor plan in the world.” Later, the two retreated to Zuckerberg’s private office. Lu sat in the CEO’s chair, took a few pictures, and then spotted a familiar book sitting on Zuckerberg’s desk. “The Governance of China” is a 515-page tome containing the speeches and comments of President Xi.
Why was such a book sitting on a capitalist’s desk?
Zuckerberg explained to his guest that he bought the book for both himself and his staff as a guide. “I want to make them understand socialism with Chinese characteristics,” he said.
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How the tech giants did not see the obvious espionage risk to their plans is a mystery. Or maybe they saw it and did not care.
GOOGLE
At the heart of Google’s business strategy is an unquenchable thirst for data, and their dealings in China show they cannot resist tapping any vast resource offered to them.
In 2017, Google announced the opening of an AI research facility in Beijing. The Google AI China Center would include “a small group of researchers supported by several hundred China-based engineers.”
The head of the venture for Google, Fei-Fei Li, explained, “I believe AI and its benefits have no borders.”
The research at the Google AI China Center includes machine learning that would classify, perceive, and predict outcomes based on massive amounts of data. This is precisely the sort of work that military and intelligence officials would want from AI.
Google’s cooperation with China on AI research occurred the same year that the Chinese Communist Party and government laid out its “artificial intelligence development plan.” A report issued by the Chinese government explains that “AI has become a new focus of international competition,” mastering that technology enhances “comprehensive national power,” and that it would lead to the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”
Beijing has declared that passing the United States in artificial intelligence is a “national priority.”
“The work that Google is doing in China is indirectly benefitting the Chinese military,” Marine General James Dunford, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a U.S. Senate committee. Then he corrected himself. “Frankly, ‘indirect’ may not be a full characterization of the way it really is, it is more of a direct benefit to the Chinese military.”
Collaboration between American tech companies and Chinese military-linked research labs has enormous implications for our national security. What makes that collaboration even more galling is the fact that China has very different anticipated uses for the technologies than the United States.
As the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence announced in its final report, “Authoritarian regimes will continue to use AI-powered face recognition, biometrics, predictive analytics, and data fusion as instruments of surveillance, influence, and political control.”
The chair of that commission? Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
In short,
Schmidt favors continued AI joint work with Beijing, knowing that they will be using it to make Orwell’s dystopian “1984” a reality.
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TESLA
Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, is an example of how even executives who talk tough about China can eventually fall in line.
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Musk had for several years denied that he was going to build a facility in China, claiming that he was quite happy with his production in the United States. In 2015, when transcripts of a meeting in China were leaked, indicating he had plans to build a factory there, he quickly declared that the transcripts were not accurate, refuting them on Twitter. “My comments in China weren’t transcribed correctly. Tesla will keep making cars & batteries in CA & NV as far into future as I can imagine.”
Beijing still courted him. In March 2017, China’s government-linked Tencent Holdings bought a 5 percent stake in Tesla. Musk explained on Twitter that Tencent would be both “an investor and advisor.” (What advisory role the company would play was never explained.)
Then Beijing rolled out the red carpet: Chinese government–backed banks coughed up $1.6 billion in subsidized loans. And the regulatory red tape to build in China was eliminated by government authorities. “What surprised me is how little time it took for the regulatory process to get approved by the Chinese government,” explained Ivan Su, an analyst at Morningstar Inc. The enormous plant was built in less than a year.
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Musk has since become a Beijing booster. In January 2021, he explained in one interview how
the unelected Beijing regime was possibly “more responsible” toward its people than the democratically elected U.S. government.
“When I meet with Chinese government officials, they’re always very concerned about this. Are people going to be happy about a thing? Is this going to actually serve the benefit of the people? It seems ironic, but
even though you have sort of a single-party system, they really actually seem to care a lot about the well- being of the people. In fact, they’re maybe even more sensitive to public opinion than what I see in the US.”
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Originally Posted by eleganz
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